Carl Little – Nick Heller: This Is What I See

On the “about” page of his website Nick Heller shares two quotes. The first comes from poet-activist John Trudell (1946–2015): “When one lives in a society where people can no longer rely on the institutions to tell them the truth, the truth must come from culture and art.” The second is attributed to Gandhi: “There is sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed.”

Heller’s work over the past decade underscores these messages. Troubled by the injustice he was witnessing in the world, he took up needle and thread, beads and sequins, to sew his powerful statements of protest.

Heller recounts how after 9/11 he started listening to Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman’s award-winning radio program. Prior to that time, busy with a woodworking business and raising children, he hadn’t paid much attention to the news. What he learned pissed him off and he felt his art should reflect his outrage.

As the Winthrop-based artist tells it, encountering voodoo flags at the exhibition In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st-Century Haitian Art at the Museum of Civilization in Quebec City in 2014 inspired him to change directions in his art. He was drawn to the flags’ powerful imagery, but also their glitter.

Soon after viewing the show, Heller dropped the abstract pencil drawings he had been making and turned to beads and sequins. This abrupt shift was not only aesthetic; it was political: he had found the means he’d been looking for to express his views on rampant injustice. “I didn’t really want to do cartoons,” he recalls.

Heller’s friend Heather Kahn, owner of Caravan Beads and co-founder of the Museum of Beadwork in Portland, supplied him with some beads and sequins. (Another supplier, the New York Bead Center, closed during the pandemic. He also buys from Cartwright’s Sequins in Arkansas.) With these materials in hand, he jumped into it, quickly becoming comfortable with the new technique.

Working from sketches in a notebook, Heller draws a rough outline on the ultra-suede backing. “Some of them come out exactly like I intend,” he notes, “but some change quite a bit.” Each piece takes him from 200 to 300 hours to complete, which gives him time to consider what he is trying to accomplish and make adjustments.

In the early work, Heller was going for a folk art look, simplifying the design, as in Eve & Adam I (2014), which he describes as “a take on a disturbing story about an apple and a one-eyed snake.” Over time he has sought greater sophistication in his compositions. The dazzling beads and sparkling sequins could be a means to lure the viewer into engaging with the subject.

Several pieces relate to environmental issues. In Neonicotinoid Lullaby bees tumble from the sky, victims of pesticides. Equally acerbic is Pipeline, in which a small figure sticks out his tongue to catch a drop of oil. A quote from the spiritual teacher Alan Watts is stitched in the piece: ​“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water.” On his website, Heller responds to this maxim with the question, “And what, then, if there is no water?”

The ravages of war appear in Heller’s Still Life with Fruit, Foot and Anti-Personnel Landmine. The lineup of a bloody foot, a tin can-shaped mine, and a decaying apple transforms a traditional tabletop arrangement into an anti-war statement.

Heller addresses the toll of gun deaths in 93 Per Day in the USA, which features a portrait of the president of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre. The crazed wide-mouthed man in bright-blue suit toting a shotgun and an assault rifle is surrounded by victims of gun violence. “I find I have an easier time doing portraits of people I dislike than people I like,” Heller says. He has done Putin (Tea with Vladimir) and is working on Trump.

Back Alley predates the overturning of Roe v. Wade. A female figure enters the darkness between two buildings, a hanger in her hand. Heller offers two definitions of the title to accompany the image on his website:

1: having a mean, furtive, or squalid character or air
​2: done secretly and illegally by someone using crude and dangerous methods.

Soli Deo Gloria or “Glory to God Alone” shows a man snipping off the heads of flowers. Heller made the piece in response to terrorist beheadings. “I was thinking about how people use religion to justify their evil deeds,” he says. Not wanting to make it too gruesome, he drew on something that happened on his mother’s street in New York City. “The block association planted tulips around all the trees,” he recounts, “and one night someone came along and ripped the heads off all of the flowers.”

One of Heller’s largest pieces, Columbus Day Tapestry, is a dark commentary on the destruction brought to the New World by the Spanish explorer. From atop a sailing ship a long-armed leering skeleton reaches toward land with clutching spidery hands. The silhouettes of black oil rigs form a row at top while what look like viruses swirl at the feet of the indigenous figure standing on the shore.

Last year Heller donated Castles Made of Sand to the Museum of Beadwork, where it will be part of its permanent collection. In the piece, a skeleton seduces and topples Lady Liberty whose flame falls in the Hudson River. The text around the image reads “and so castles made of sand fall in the sea eventually,” a line from a famous Jimi Hendrix song.

The museum is also currently displaying a recently completed piece, The Coronation Chasuble. This riff on the liturgical gown worn by ordained clergy for the celebration of the Eucharist in Christian churches features the faces of the six conservative Supreme Court justices, with Clarence Thomas at top. Each of them wears a red cap with a crown on it, which gives them a jester-like look.

Heller is modest about his work. “I’m not expecting it to change anything; it’s just sort of cathartic for me.” While he feels compelled to make this art, he also says he likes beads and sequins.

Beginning in 2015 Heller started sewing the letters HEQV into his pieces along with his initials. The Latin phrase, hoq est quod video, translated as “this is what I see,” serves as a kind of motto. His goal, he has written, is to create powerful and thought-provoking images that are also beautiful in an abstract manner that transcends the message, “reflecting the paradox that in life, beauty and horror often coexist.”

 

Most of the citations in this article are from a phone interview with the artist on 13 February 2025. 

[Heller’s work can be viewed on his website. Part of the proceeds from any sale of his work goes to Konbit Sante, a Maine-based nonprofit dedicated to the “development of a sustainable health system to meet the needs of the Cap-Haitien community in Haiti with maximum local direction and support.” For more background on voodoo flags, visit Amy Wilentz and the Indigo Arts Alliance.]